Could Reprogrammed Cells Fight "Untreatable" Diseases?

August 27, 2014 5:58 PM

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Jeanne Loring and her Scripps Research Institute colleagues transplanted a set of cells into the spinal cords of mice that had lost use of their hind limbs to multiple sclerosis. As the experimentalists expected, within a week, the mice rejected the cells. But after another week, the mice began to walk.

"We thought that they wouldn't do anything," says Loring, who directs the Center for Regenerative Medicine at Scripps. But as her lab has since shown numerous times, and published in Stem Cell Reports, something that these particular so-called "neural precursor cells" do before the immune system kic...